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Month: September 2016

Scope: I am testing a WikiHow page. It is a single page web document with instructions on how to complete a task.
Purpose: My purpose for this document is to be as clear and concise as possible. I want to contain a lot of valuable info in as little words as possible to get my message across. I also need to make sure that the instructions are clear. For the page to be successful I have to have everything be layed out in a way that is detailed and helpful, but also user-friendly.
Schedule & Location: The user will navigate to my site, and be given 10 minutes to complete the task. This will give me a good estimate of how easy everything is to use and how clear cut the instructions are. Any pain points of the instructions will be visible if they cannot complete the task in this amount of time.
Equipment: For this test I will be using a smartphone and a laptop to test the webpage. Both of these formats will be available on the internet.
Participants: The participants of this experiment will be members of the Wayne State school of Engineering. They should be well versed in technology and savvy enough to handle a task like this.
Scenarios:
Metrics: The metrics I will be using is a basic schema of how they interacted with the instructions and if they completed the task or not. If they did not complete the task, I will identify where they got tripped up.

I want to publish a WikiHow article on how to do something technical. The topic that I want to write a WikiHow article about is how to comment on a MatLab program. Matlab is a program used by engineers and scientists that helps you solve problems that primarily deal with numbers. I searched for other articles that dealt with this topic, and came up with nothing. I searched for “Matlab” on the WikiHow article directory and I didn’t see any articles that told you how to write comments on Matlab code.

This is a poignant topic because I am actually using this program right now in my CSC 1500 class. We are utilizing the program to write code and it would be helpful to share what I have learned about it inside this WikiHow article.

My name is Andrew Lee. I am a student at Wayne State University currently taking a Technical Writing class, and this blog will be an online record of the work I will be doing. Along the way I will document what I am learning, and any interesting info I come across throughout my journey.

Above is an example of a resume that is not helping Craig Kunce find a job. In fact it might be hurting him. Let’s explain why. I will mainly be looking at the design of the resume in conjunction with principles that make an applicant look presentable and professional. Some of these are: simplicity, harmony, and balance.

The first thing we see on this resume is the apparent lack of variety as far as design is concerned. Everything is styled the same way. Basic black text that is centered. I would definitely consider changing the way a heading is formatted, possibly positioning it to the left, and putting the text underneath it, un-centered. Right now everything is placed inside a bullet point, this makes it very hard to read.

There is something called the quadrant test, which says that the readers’ eyes go from left to right and top to bottom. According to this, your resume should be split into four different quadrants of information. This resume is one big list, which fails the quadrant test.

Another way to design your resume to be pleasing to the eye is to make it divided into different headings and sub-headings based on font. One good way to do this is to use sans-serif fonts for headings, and use serif fonts for the body of the heading. Serif fonts are easier to read, and sans-serif fonts make the eye “stop” on the page. An example of a good serif font is Times New Roman.